Downtown Ojai’s newest hotel, which is also its oldest, stands along Ojai Avenue like a rancher in his best string tie and leather vest.
This property, now known as Hotel El Roblar, has been a fixture on Ojai’s main street for more than a century — party to multiple civic dramas, one fraud conviction, repeated closures and four decades of fitness retreats. Now, after years of negotiation and restoration, a new team of owners has reshaped the place to evoke Old California, celebrate the Ojai Valley’s wild side and lure Angelenos looking to escape the city.
“There’s a hitching post outside, next to the bike rack,” hotel partner Jeremy McBride pointed out, noting that horseback visits aren’t out of the question.
In a town that’s short on lodging supply, the Roblar stands out for its size, its place in local history and the way it wears that history on its walls. Oh, and the two giant tortoises out back.
It went up in 1919, a blend of Spanish Revival and California Mission Revival styles. Its 2 acres include 39 guest rooms, 11 bungalows, a pool, an event space, a dinner restaurant (the Condor Bar) and a breakfast-and-lunch restaurant (La Cocina). It reopened this summer with nightly rates of $455 and up.
“There are so many trendy design hotels out there, and we certainly didn’t want to do that,” said Eric Goode, the partner with the most longstanding ties to the area. “Ojai is rustic and horsey. It’s not Montecito.”
The hotel entrance is framed by an arch that echoes those in Ojai’s downtown arcade building. Most of the bungalows have kiva-style fireplaces. In the Cocina breakfast-and-lunch room, the bar wall is a stack of colored bottles mortared together with concrete like a ghost town bottle-house.
The centerpiece of the lobby is a stacked-stone fireplace. The walls feature a wrap-around mural filled with Ojai Valley flora and fauna.
The room looks like it goes back a century. But the fireplace is new, rebuilt to resemble old photos. So is the mural, painted by artist Stefano Castronovo last year.
Though Goode, 67, is best known elsewhere as an entrepreneur and maker of documentaries, he spent a chunk of his childhood in the Ojai Valley. While his father was teaching at the Thacher School, Goode said, he was “catching horned lizards and rattlesnakes and putting them in my lunchbox.”
Later, Goode created New York’s Area nightclub/art gallery in the 1980s; took ownership roles in several hotels and restaurants, including New York’s Bowery Hotel; and co-founded the nonprofit Turtle Conservancy with Maurice Rodrigues. Later still, Goode produced and directed the documentary series “Tiger King” (2020) and “Chimp Crazy” (2024).
For about 35 years, Goode said, he has kept a home in Ojai and returned frequently. Yet for most of that time, Goode said, “I never thought I’d do a business here.” The key, he said, was finding a historic property whose reopening might feel more like a revival than a disruption to local culture.
When Ojai and the Roblar were born
The Roblar was born as modern Ojai was taking shape between 1917 and 1920. That’s when the town was renamed from Nordhoff to Ojai and local leader E.D. Libbey hired architects Richard Requa and Frank Mead to effectively reshape the city after a fire.
They designed the city’s long arcade along Ojai Avenue; its signature post office and tower; a church that became the Ojai Valley Museum; and the Roblar, all crafted with Spanish Colonial and Mission Revival features.
While Ojai’s reputation spread as a sophisticated small town with a spiritual bent and spectacular setting, the Roblar prospered, faltered, was renamed the Oaks, added a bar, added a pool and added bungalows. It also added a neon sign and then subtracted it, eventually forsaking much of its original design as owners and managers came and went.
By one account, the hotel’s early managers included a Mr. Canfield from Santa Barbara, followed by Mr. Cromwell from San Francisco, both of whom committed suicide. Later came Frank Keenan, a former Chicago alderman who bought the hotel in 1952 and in 1957 was convicted in Illinois of federal income tax evasion.
“We hope not to follow in their footsteps,” Goode said.
The hotel entered a different era in 1977, when fitness entrepreneur Sheila Cluff remade it as a health-oriented retreat, later passing leadership to her daughter, Cathy Cluff. The Oaks closed in 2017 after suffering smoke damage in the Thomas fire — and when the Cluff family put the property up for sale, the new owners stepped in.
New rooms, new art, roaming reptiles
Nobody will mistake El Roblar for a fitness retreat now. Though its pool and gym are likely to get plenty of use, the new owners are clearly focused on comfort, style and history.
Besides Goode and McBride, who has a background as an entrepreneur and filmmaker, the partners include designer Ramin Shamshiri and restaurateur Warner Ebbink (who co-owns the Little Dom’s restaurants in Los Feliz and Carpinteria and Bar Lou in Montecito).
The sale closed in September 2019. Then the pandemic arrived. It took six years of design, permit negotiations with the city, restoration and construction before the hotel reopened under its original name.
Because the the Oaks was run as a mostly private fitness retreat, McBride said, the restart of the hotel means “it’s really open to the community for the first time in 50 years.”
Its dinner restaurant, the Condor Bar, led by executive chef Brandon Boudet, opened July 17, serving “California Mexican” cuisine and using a Santa Maria-style wood-fired grill. Work continues on the eight guest rooms in the hotel’s Sycamore building, scheduled to open in mid-September.
Across Ventura Street from the hotel, the new owners have also bought a property that once housed World University (which closed in 2017). Their plan still needs city approval, but the hotel owners have said they aim to open a 9,000-square-foot spa and wellness facility “to complement the hotel” in the next 18 to 24 months.
The overarching idea, McBride said, is for the Roblar space to feel “not like a new, fancy hotel, but something that’s always been here.”
The public areas and guest rooms are filled with custom and antique furniture and more than 1,000 pieces of art, many of them from California Auctioneers in Casitas Springs and Early California Antiques in Oxnard. The walls of the restaurant are crowded full of condor images and artifacts — “like you’re having dinner in your favorite natural history museum,” McBride said.
In the walled garden by the hotel’s bungalows, two Aldabra giant tortoises, Abra and Cadabra, creep between sun and shade. (They’re on loan from the Turtle Conservancy. For $100 per adult, Roblar guests can sign up for a tour of the conservancy’s Ojai property, which includes about 500 turtles and tortoises.)
The hotel’s website notes that the property and its fireplaces, balconies and lifeguard-less pool are “designed for adults” and that “we discourage children [as overnight guests] for safety reasons.” Dogs under 60 pounds are welcome (with a $250 fee). Also, photography and video recording “are not permitted in shared spaces,” though a ban on selfies might be difficult to enforce.
The Roblar’s rates hint at the short supply of lodging in Ojai, which has drawn many entertainment industry figures yet guards its small-town character aggressively.
The city has about 7,600 residents and a dozen hotels. It levies one of the state’s highest hotel tax rates (15%), forbids short-term vacation rentals and bans chain businesses with five or more locations. The largest hotel in town is the 303-room Ojai Valley Inn, which has its own golf course and summer rates that start around $780.
In 2022, the school board turned down a plan to convert a school district site into a 200-room hotel. Last year, Mayor Andy Gilman’s winning campaign called for civil discourse and open minds, but warned of “our over-dependence on tourism.”
Parking might be the most controversial part of the Roblar’s rebirth. To make room for other elements, the new owners got permission to take out the hotel’s public parking lot, secure off-site parking and require that guests use valet service ($50 nightly). This satisfied city officials, but not some neighbors.
“Just another sickening display of LA $$$$. No real parking,” one Ojai resident complained on Facebook.
Awkward as these debates can be, McBride said, it’s the protective attitude of Ojai residents that has helped keep the city’s identity in place.
“This place is still so special,” he said. “There’s a reason why people who are here want to preserve it.”
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